Effortless English: Learn To Speak English Like a native

 
MORE LISTENING PRACTICE
Looking for another great way to practice listening to English? Perhaps you
might want to follow my weekly Effortless English™ Show. I do a talk show
about mastering spoken English. This show is a great way to get easy English
listening. As most Effortless English™ members know, easy and relaxed English
listening is an important key to speaking English fluently.
To speak English fluently, you must listen to a lot of English – preferably easy
and understandable English. My show is one way to get plenty of English

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audio. These are a great supplement to other English lessons or materials.
It’s very easy to get my show! Just “Follow” me on Twitter. Go
to Twitter.com/ajhoge. If you don’t have an account, create one. Then go to my
page and click “Follow.” That’s all! It’s super easy.
Each week, check my Twitter page for “tweets” about the next Effortless
English™ Show. Click on the link in each tweet to watch the video and download
the audio. 
If you prefer, you can search for the “Effortless English™ Podcast” on iTunes,
where I put all of the audio recordings of the show.
The video recordings of past shows are also available on my YouTube channel,
which is another source of learning suggestions and English audio.
Subscribe to my YouTube channel at: Youtube.com/ajhoge
Listening Practice
To help students improve their listening, I often suggest an exercise known as the
“Movie Technique.” To do this, you need to pick an English-language movie that
you enjoy. Again, pick a fairly easy one, where you will understand most of the
words used.
Begin by watching the first scene. This should take about 3 to 5 minutes. Turn on
the English subtitles. As you go through it, pause if there is a something you don’t
understand. Look up the meaning of the word or phrase in an idiomatic dictionary.
Watch the scene until you know all the words of it and understand.
The next day, watch the same scene again, several times. Once you understand the
vocabulary, turn off the subtitles. Then watch the scene again, listening without the
subtitles. Do this every day for the next five days or so. You might spend four or
five days on one scene, but that’s okay. Each repetition improves your English
listening ability.
Now watch the scene again, but try pausing after each sentence or phrase. Repeat
the sentence out loud. In fact, don’t just repeat the sentence, act out the scene. Copy
the speech of the actors. Copy their movements, facial expressions, and emotions.
Pretend you are the characters in the scene. Remember the movie pronunciation
exercise? This is another version of it.
This entire movie technique might take you a whole week for just one scene.
When you feel you have mastered the scene, you can start the entire process again
with the next scene. It might take several months to get through one movie, to really
learn it, but that’s the point. The movie technique is a way to thoroughly learn and

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master all of the English used in a film. This method will improve your listening,
your fluency, and your pronunciation. If you just watch a movie once, without using
this process, you get little to no benefit from it.